Unlock Your Past, Free Your Future

Susan had never told her parents the truth about her marriage. She'd been with her husband for 22 years—two decades' worth of nagging him about his drinking, fighting that gave way to shoving and slapping, and crawling into bed with furniture piled in front of the door. From her mother, Susan, 45, had absorbed the importance of keeping up appearances. And by all appearances, her parents' marriage was a model of caring and respect. They'd never believe what a long, dark mess her own abusive relationship had become. She had trouble believing it herself. So in the fall of 2011, when Susan called home to say she was getting divorced, she was floored by her parents' response. Not only were they well aware of her husband's drinking problem, but her mother hinted that she could relate to her daughter's plight. "I thought, How could she possibly?" says Susan, who began to wonder if perhaps someone in her mother's family history had been an alcoholic.

In the spring, Susan would take her annual trip with her daughter from Boston to Florida to see her parents, but in the meantime, she found herself roiling with rage—at the world, at her estranged husband, and especially at herself. She couldn't understand why she'd put up with so much for so long, and she couldn't get past her resentment over so many wasted years. To try to figure it out, Susan signed up for a weekend session with life-coaching firm The Handel Group.

She went through myriad exercises—outlining her parents' traits alongside her own, detailing painful memories—and her coaches noted the similarities between Susan and her mother (their tendency to control, their propensity for denial). "They kept saying, 'There's a pattern here that will help explain your marriage,' but I didn't see it," says Susan. Nevertheless, she began to gently probe her family's past during her calls home. Her mother divulged little on the phone.

But the morning after Susan arrived in Florida, the two women went for a walk. They were barely past the driveway when her mother revealed that she'd been married briefly and unhappily some 45 years ago. Her husband had been an abusive alcoholic; she eventually left him (and he died shortly thereafter), but not before they'd had a child together.

Shocked, Susan tried to absorb the news. Not only was the man she knew as her father not her biological father, but without having any inkling of her mother's first marriage, she'd been reliving it for years.

Some might chalk this up to a spooky coincidence, but a buzzy type of therapy implies otherwise. Working from the idea that people may be predisposed to repeat family patterns—thanks to the "emotional DNA" they carry—supporters of this theory posit that Susan was destined to repeat her mother's life story. Especially once the truth was hidden from her.

Hand-Me-Down Behaviors
The main tenet of lineage theory, also called family systems therapy, might come as a relief to some and sound like an excuse to others: Your problems are neither created nor cured by you alone. Rather, your actions are spurred by society and your extended family (defined as at least three generations), so that you often mimic those who've come before you.

The most obvious examples involve kids picking up their parents' discernible behaviors. Research shows, for instance, that you could inherit your family's communication patterns. So if you grew up in a house where sarcastic or rude comments were fair game at the dinner table, it makes sense that you're more likely to bring similar hostility into your relationships.

Other times, people might reenact their parents' mistakes in the process of subconsciously trying to "fix" their parents, says Lauren Zander, cofounder of The Handel Group. You might choose a partner who will cheat on you, just as your father cheated on your mother, because you're trying to prove that with enough love and understanding, men like him can be "cured." (Or you might become the cheater yourself, in an effort to comprehend and, ultimately, forgive your father.)

Less obvious is how what you don't know about your family may shadow you, writing in invisible ink the script for some of your biggest life choices. Zander chalks up this phenomenon to that emotional DNA—a particular cocktail of nature and nurture served up by our forebearers—that may covertly influence our attitudes and behaviors.

The stuff is so powerful that family-therapy pioneer Monica McGoldrick, L.C.S.W., routinely spends her first session with a client just gathering basic family history. Hometowns, religious views, education levels, occupations, births, deaths, marriages, divorces—she collects it all, convinced she'll find an answer to the present in the past. ("If a client thinks it's a waste of time," she says, "we'll go back to the acute problem—say, a marital issue—and I'll ask if anyone else in the family has gone through something similar. And we're right back at the grandmother again.")

The idea is that even in cases where people are puzzled by their own out-of-nowhere behavior, if they look closely enough at their family history, similar patterns can begin to emerge, says Norman Epstein, Ph.D., director of the couple and family therapy program at the University of Maryland. The problem is that most families trade in secrecy—especially around painful events—which keeps troubling patterns veiled and off the table for discussion. The result: Those patterns, even ones people might think they've identified, can leak into the next generation. And the next.

History, Hidden in Plain Sight
An honors grad of the top entrepreneurial program in the country, Leann, 38, fully expected her first solo venture to be a success. She had the experience, she'd perfected her idea (a firm that designed productive office spaces), and she had business acumen in her blood. Growing up, she'd watched her dad run his own copy-machine company, serve as president of his national association, and champion new copier technology. He seemed in charge of everything and everyone. She set out to make him proud.

Instead, Leann made every rookie mistake in the book. She invested a huge sum in a fancy website that she didn't need and couldn't afford. She paid a disproportionate amount of money to her employees, even though she did most of the work. "It was like I'd forgotten everything I'd learned about business plans," she says.

Soon, Leann had nearly squandered the $50,000 she sank into her company, and she was working herself to death in the process, contracting mononucleosis, strep throat, and back problems from the stress and long hours. Yet she still showed up at 7 a.m. meetings with a smile on her face, assuring everyone that things were great. She was too proud to ask her father for help.

In desperation, Leann sought counseling to find out why she was failing so miserably at the work she was born to do. A family-history exercise prompted her to ask her father about his father, whom Leann hadn't known well. To her surprise, she learned her grandfather had also been an entrepreneur, starting many businesses—none of which succeeded.

That revelation made Leann reconsider her dad's track record, which suddenly didn't seem so glowing. She recalled how he'd blown a chance to sell his business for a huge profit, then botched a stock transfer that cost months of lawyer's fees to fix. She also became aware that she shared some of her father's least helpful traits: making up for inefficiency by working overtime, a carelessness that led to mistakes, a penchant for overcomplicating things—all covered up with bravado.

The realization hit Leann hard. Her grandfather's failures had compelled her dad to present a rosier picture than reality warranted; that, in turn, made her feel as if she had to be perfect from the get-go, rather than trusting that she'd eventually succeed. New perspective in hand, Leann reorganized and soon landed a large client, whom she focused on servicing well, which helped her turn her business around.

Leaving Well Enough Alone
While it can seem mind-bending, lineage theory isn't totally novel. In the 1980s, psychologist Randy Gerson, Ph.D., developed computer software to help therapists map the behaviors of multiple generations of a family. These maps, called genograms, have been used in family therapy for decades. Even counselors who favor the more here-and-now style of cognitive behavioral therapy acknowledge genograms' worth.

However, says Epstein, digging indiscriminately into family history isn't always a great idea. "Sometimes things are covered up because they are really traumatic," he explains, "and you can end up retraumatizing someone." Before McGoldrick launches a family fact-finding mission with clients, she warns them to prepare themselves for any possible outcomes. She often shares the story of a woman who confronted her mother about a particularly difficult family secret; the mother got so upset she had a heart attack. (A rare outcome, but a warning nonetheless.)

What's more, for some people, focusing too much on the past can lead them to fault others for the problems in their lives, says San Diego–based psychiatrist David Reiss, M.D. Blaming Mom and Dad (or Grandma and Grandpa) for all your woes can mute a crucial sense of personal responsibility—and make you feel like the wronged party. "If an exploration of family history turns into an exercise of looking for revenge or seeking confirmation of your own victimhood, then you're on the wrong path," says Reiss.

Ultimately, any time spent looking back should be undertaken with the intention of wanting to improve your life today. Such a change is entirely possible, since people can inherit positive as well as negative behavioral patterns, and, adds Epstein, "they can learn by example how to be resilient in the face of all sorts of stresses."

Building on the Past
As a younger woman, Angie, 34, had always imagined having a family of her own. But the physical urge to have a baby (a.k.a. her biological clock) never kicked in—if anything, she felt the opposite. She'd see someone with kids and think, What an imposition, yet, strangely, she was routinely drawn to men who said they wanted children.

Nothing in her past could explain Angie's negative knee-jerk reaction to kids. Her own childhood had been relatively happy. Her parents weren't particularly demonstrative, but she never doubted they loved her. Confused, she brought up the topic while getting unrelated career counseling at The Handel Group. Her life coach suggested that the answer might lie in her lineage.

Angie's mother's family was a big part of her life and had already been forthcoming.

Her father was more reserved, but she knew his history as well, including the fact that his father had been raised by neighbors after his mother died in childbirth. Nothing clicked for Angie, but she called an uncle, just in case. What she learned completely shifted her attitude.

It turns out that after her great-grandfather lost his wife to a difficult childbirth, her grandfather's eventual wife had a stillborn baby. He went on to have more kids, including Angie's dad, but the deaths introduced a specter of disconnect and tragedy around the experience of having children—an attitude that had been passed down to Angie without her realizing it.

A surprising outcome for Angie was a newfound compassion for the men in her father's family. She saw that to have been so profoundly affected by these deaths, they must have had huge hearts and great stores of empathy. This, too, was part of her legacy, along with her ambivalence toward kids; recognizing it helped her open up to her own fears and desires around motherhood. She's now dating a man with whom she's discussing having children.

In a similar vein, when Susan finally learned about her secret biological father, she felt motivated. Her mother, whom Susan had always thought of as a nervous housewife, had left him while living in Thailand, where she knew no one, and had taken a job as a hotel maid (after a glamorous career as a TV host) to support her infant daughter. She worked her way up to a manager position until she had the money to move back home to Taiwan. There, she met the man Susan knew as her father, a U.S. Air Force engineer stationed overseas. After he returned stateside, he courted Susan's mom for a year through letters until he'd saved up enough to return to Taiwan, marry her, and formally adopt Susan.

The truth was a much more beautiful and inspiring story than the vague lie Susan had grown up with. From it, she takes heart. "I now know there was something inside me that I needed to address, a pattern that needed to be broken for my own daughter," says Susan. "But I also know that I have my mom's strength, and that I will make it through this."